Our professional reviewers evaluate products and services independently, but Top Consumer Reviews may earn money when you click on the links on our pages. Learn more.

IP Vanish VPN Review

To help you find the Best VPN Services, TopConsumerReviews.com provides you with an in-depth IP Vanish VPN Review.

To see ALL of our reviews for the Best VPN Services, please Click Here

What's the best VPN Service? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It does just what it says. It creates a virtual (as opposed to physical) private network for you by encrypting (or scrambling) each and every piece of data that goes from your computer out onto the Internet as well as any data that comes back to you from the Internet.

So, who needs a VPN? If you're concerned about the rising problem of "hackers" - people who infiltrate computers and networks to steal or misuse information - you should be looking at a VPN service. Or, if you think your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may log, monitor, or analyze what you do online, a VPN is for you.

Another nice feature of the IP Vanish VPN service is that it can make Voice over IP (VoIP) phone calling much cheaper by making it appear that your connection is originating in countries in which the VoIP has lower rates. Whether this seems ethical to do is up to you and that top-hatted cricket named Jiminy sitting on your shoulder.

If you live in a country with heavy censorship laws and/or government monitoring of communications, this is a good service to use to ensure that you can chat, browse, and do video calls free from interference and arrest. Because IP Vanish doesn't keep any logs or records about its users' activities, you need not worry about a subpoena or search warrant outing you.

Certain ISPs will do a deep inspection of the data packets you transmit and receive. They do this to limit your bandwidth on video sites, torrent sites, gaming, and other bandwidth-intensive activities. With IP Vanish, your packets can't be inspected this way and your ISP can't make a determination as to which traffic to throttle.

IP Vanish VPN gives you a 7-day money-back guarantee in case you want to give it a spin before committing to a monthly, tri-monthly, or annual plan. Buy the $10.00 per month if you only want to be billed monthly, the $8.99 per month plan if you don't mind being billed every three months, or the $6.49 per month plan if it's more convenient to be billed yearly.

IP Vanish has unlimited bandwidth and unlimited server switching. But, it only allows up to 5 simultaneous connections on multiple devices, so if you're looking for unlimited connection ability, try another service.

IP Vanish VPN operates on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices and on an unlimited number of devices all at the same time.

Support for IP Vanish VPN is 24/7 and obtained via online support articles and FAQs and email only. No phone or chat support is available.

On the Better Business Bureau website, IP Vanish has an "F" rating with 27 total customer complaints and 14 customer reviews. All but one of the reviews is negative. Review feedback includes problems logging into accounts, refund refusals, slow Internet speeds with the software, continued charges after cancellation, nonresponse to emails, not honoring promotional prices, not actually creating or losing an
account after payment receipt, and software not working on all devices. While IPVanish has responded to many of the complaints, the BBB is not convinced they are doing enough to support their customers.

Other review websites seem to confirm the BBB reviewers' complaints, saying the company is just out to get money without providing real service and support. They dislike the poor connectivity and speed, asking customers for social security number and other sensitive data (a claim that is disputed by positive reviewers, but still confusing), buffering problems, and lack of support for certain services and devices in
various countries.

With so many problems and complaints to documented on the Better Business Bureau website, IP Vanish should be at the very bottom of your list of VPN services to try.

Millions of credit cards can be exposed online at any given moment as people purchase things from popular ecommerce sites. If the ecommerce site you're buying from doesn't bother to encrypt that information, a hacker can "sniff" that information right out of your connection with the website. Anything you type into a vendor's website form becomes fair game for identity fraudsters and thieves.

Furthermore, ISPs have been known to sell their user's information to marketers and advertisers. Or, they can use it to restrict (throttle) your bandwidth and block access to sites they don't want you to see.

Finally, a VPN is useful for people who live in countries where governments regularly censor information not flattering to the state, or that they deem to be harmful to their citizens. Protests, rallies, and citizen actions that get started online usually don't have a chance of being successful without some type of VPN service protecting the organizers from being spied on.

To choose a VPN service, you need to research their features and compare their costs, reputations, security, performance, and customer service. Some of the factors to use when researching VPN services include:

Features: Which VPN features set one service apart from all the others? Why is it important to have those features?

Cost: Are their free trials and/or money-back guarantees? Is there a way to save more in the long term by paying quarterly or annually, or even longer?

Reputation: How do current and former customers feel about their experience using a particular VPN solution? If they had a bad experience, how long had they been using the VPN?

Security: Are there redundancies and safety nets built into the system in case of failure? Are logs kept of your activities? Are there enough IP addresses and servers scattered throughout the world to more effectively hide every user's activity and location?

A VPN, or virtual private network, routes all your web traffic to and from a device. So, someone observing your connection (like your ISP) won't see the sites and services you use. Instead, they just ...

The built-in VPN was rolled out to beta testers early last month who were tasked with helping to work out the kinks. Clearly there weren't many as Opera is now happy to let the Android-owning masses ...

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has added a built-in no-log VPN service to its latest version for Android, Opera 51, the company says in a statement. Opera Software had a separate VPN client ...

Opera has released the latest stable version of its mobile browser for Android, with various updates including the introduction of a built-in VPN service. The company has provided VPN functionality on ...